Jewels

Riverbank urban date

« It’s untranslatable », she said
It meant « lesbian drama », the kind where every lesbian in a friend group has dated everyone else
« In Brazilian Portuguese they have a word for everything », she said

She told me she tagged the house of her abuser with some friends of hers She told me of
the time she took MDMA
And of the time she hitchhiked through Europe

« Train tickets are cheap in Italy too »
« I found a Ryanair flight to Spain for 5 euros »
« It’s untranslatable », I said

And we talked about language and anarchism and economy and philosophy and love and
drinking and the world and queer-phobic slurs we knew in each language we spoke and of
how much of them we could reclaim

I said « non j’ai jamais essayé autre chose que la weed » « non je parle très mal espagnol »
And that’s all I could speak of

I asked how she found squats to party at
And where she had been
And how it had felt
And I felt like I hadn’t lived
Not quite yet
Not quite like she had

She had both the language of books and ink and the road and the sun I only had the theory,
the dry one that I stole from writers and thinkers She told me « it’s untranslatable » and I
answered « ouais, je vois »

*

Anxiety attack in a small working-class town

We were eating cold fries under fairy lights
Drinking bad local beer
Listening to the local band slaughter nostalgic songs

She booed when they played Noir Désir
She said “I’m not listening to a song written by a murderer”
We nodded

We had coffee at her friend’s house at 2 am
and talked about life and failures
They told us of the flood, of the strange feeling of crossing their own street on a boat

This is a watery region
Of swamps and rivers

I drank the coffee with them
carved a sigil under my shoe
listened to songs from the early 2000’s
felt old
headed home